Possessed (22 page)

Ana in her bloody clothes in the HPD interrogation room

T
he final exchange in which she'd described the killing had been an emotional one, containing the information the two investigators had so patiently waited to hear. At that point, four hours into the interview, Evans and Triplett were done; they'd not only heard but videotaped Ana Trujillo's account of the final moments of Stefan Andersson's life.

Ready to move on, Triplett checked Ana's basic information, confirming her birthdate and the correct spelling for her name. He asked if she was on any medications, and she said she wasn't. “What's your mother's name?” the sergeant asked. “Or don't you want her to be contacted?”

“Yeah,” Trujillo answered, apparently meaning no. “I don't think that she will take it well.”

Moments later, two forensic
officers entered the room, a woman and a man, carrying a camera and evidence bags. First they took a photo of Ana against the wall in her blood-soaked top and jeans. Then they ordered her to take off her outer clothing and put her things into the bags. She did. As she removed her jeans, she pulled from a pocket the two white crystals she always carried with her, ones she claimed had the power to protect her and to heal.

Stripped down to her bra and underpants, Ana Trujillo stood against the wall as one of the CSU officers snapped photos. As he did, Ana pointed at bruises. Earlier she'd told the two investigators the injuries resulted from her fight with Chanda Ellison. Now, perhaps sensing the interview hadn't gone well, she implied they were indications of where Stefan Andersson had hit her.

Leaving her with the forensic officers, Evans and Triplett said nothing, instead turning their backs and walking out of the room. They'd had hours to evaluate Trujillo, but they knew little about her. Alone, her head hanging down, dressed in the white jumpsuit she'd been given to cover her bloody jeans, did she look like a brutal killer? Or was she telling the truth? Did they believe that Stefan was the violent one? Had Ana acted only in self-defense?

Apparently, something about her interview left the investigators with doubts about her truthfulness.

At 1:29
P.M.
, nearly twelve hours after Andersson and Trujillo left Bar 5015, Triplett and Evans gathered their notes on the case to take to the Harris County District Attorney's intake unit to talk to a prosecutor. After they left the interview room, the sound of metal hitting metal was heard, as handcuffs were locked onto Ana Trujillo's wrists. When Triplett and Evans left the DA's office that Sunday, they carried an arrest warrant signed by a judge charging Ana Trujillo Fox with murder.

W
hile the forensic team combed through Stefan's apartment and homicide detectives questioned Ana, the press heard the first reports of a killing in the posh Parklane
apartments, a grisly scene in which a woman pummeled an unnamed man to death with a stiletto heel.

Anders Berkenstam saw the report on the television. “What if it's Stefan, and she killed him now?” he said.

Hours later, the University of Houston, where Berkenstam was a faculty member with Stefan, called to tell him that it was, in fact, his friend who had died. The news must have hit the Berkenstams hard. They were both good friends of Stefan's, and they'd been warning him for months to stay away from Ana. It had gotten so uncomfortable, that when they saw him walking down the street with her, they turned and walked away.

When a friend called and told Annika what had happened, she had a hard time believing it. Although she knew Ana had been a problem for Stefan, she'd never imagined such an outcome, that the woman would actually take his life. Yet before she had an opportunity to sit down and consider what she'd just heard, allow the sadness to creep in, she had a task, to contact Stefan's family in Sweden and his large circle of friends.

Biking on a trail that afternoon in Dallas, Stan Rich took a break to call Stefan. The two men talked nearly every Sunday. When Stefan didn't answer, Rich left a message: “Hey, Stefan, what's happening?” Ten minutes later, Rich's phone rang.

“Did you get the e-mail?” a friend asked. When Rich said he hadn't, the caller said, “Stefan was murdered in his apartment last night.”

Ana killed him,
Rich thought, remembering back to his many conversations with Stefan.

When Annika told Ran Holcomb, the CPA was with a client. Cutting it short, he rushed home and logged onto the Internet to check the news reports. Reading them, he kept remembering all Stefan had said, including that Ana had been violent with him. “But I didn't think this was possible,” he'd say later. “How could any of us have imagined that she would kill him?”

Returning from a tow job, James Wells turned on the television and saw the image of The Parklane in a news report. Turning up the sound, he and Chanda listened to a reporter talk about a gruesome scene inside the building, a horrific murder. “Please Lord Jesus,” Wells said. “Don't tell me Ana did something stupid.”

Then they heard: “It happened in apartment 18B.”

“That's Stefan's apartment,” Chanda said.

Moments later, the station ran video of Ana being taken to a squad car to be driven downtown for questioning. Wells felt his knees buckle, and Chanda wept.

T
he following day, a Monday, at 11:06
A.M.
, Stefan Andersson's body lay on a stainless-steel autopsy table at the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, a redbrick building with smoky glass windows slightly more than two miles southwest of The Parklane. Jennifer Ross, M.D., the assistant medical examiner assigned to the case, stood next to the table along with Officer Miller, the homicide detective who'd spent the previous day documenting the scene.

At first, Ross, in scrubs, wearing a surgical mask, a hat, and latex gloves, had no need for a scalpel, as she assessed the body before her. In her notes, she described what she saw, a man who looked his age, fifty-nine. When the body was found, Stefan's black shirt was pushed up under his arms, revealing his chest and abdomen. Once the ME pulled it down, she saw a sketch of an agave plant in green. Across it was the Hornitos tequila logo, ironically a brand from Ana Trujillo's birthplace in Jalisco, Mexico.

Before cutting the shirt from the body, Ross documented tears near the neckline, one on the right shoulder and the other in the front. White hairs adhered to the shirt, scattered about it, and Ross found more stuck to the blood coating his hands. The only apparent evidence of Ana appeared to be a few long dark hairs clutched in Stefan's right hand. Those, the shirt, and the white hairs were collected and bagged as evidence, along with Stefan's key ring and wallet.

On the autopsy table, Stefan Andersson weighed in at 180
pounds and measured five feet nine inches in height. Ross described his body as cold, noting that was to be expected after nearly a day in a morgue cooler. A slight purplish lividity in his back indicated how he'd lain on the floor, the blood accumulating at its lowest point after his heart stopped pumping.

As the exterior exam continued, the physician carefully documented the obvious signs of injury. On Stefan Andersson's corpse, that would and wouldn't be a difficult task. “There are blunt force injuries of the head, neck, torso and extremities,” Ross wrote. The problem was not finding the wounds; it was that there were so many. “A cluster of approximately eleven blunt-force injuries on the left frontal scalp, centered two and a half inches below the top of the head.” She judged that the injuries were right-angled, full-thickness, abraded lacerations, some L-shaped, with each “arm of the L” measuring one-half inch in length.

That grouping finished, she examined the left side of Stefan's face, near his scalp. Here she found another cluster, this time of approximately ten wounds. Several were vertical, and she noted that some were superficial. There were bruises on Stefan's left ear and near his left eye. On the posterior parietal scalp, the crown of the head toward the back, she found several oddly shaped abrasions, the largest measuring one-half inch.

A long list developed of cuts across much of Stefan's head, from the crown to the cheeks, even on his eyelids and the bridge of his nose, his lips and inside his mouth. When Ross employed her scalpel and dissected his neck, expertly peeling away layers of skin and tissue, she found intramuscular hemorrhaging, a possible indicator of strangulation.

Continuing on, the forensic pathologist listed the bruises on Stefan's chest and abdomen, including three blue contusions each measuring nearly an inch on the lower left chest. Here, unlike with the head wounds, Ross saw little bleeding. The same was true when she turned her attention to lesions
on the right back. Opposite those, on his left back, she discovered a five-and-an-eighth-inch abrasion accompanied by minimal bleeding.

On Stefan's right arm, the physician noted more injuries, consistent with those she'd already enumerated, some up to nearly an inch long, and a small laceration to the palm at the base of the second finger, along with a bruise on the wrist.

On the left hand, Ross found fewer but similar bruises. When she surveyed the totality of the injuries to the arms and hands, she assessed them all as consistent with defensive wounds, occurring when Stefan raised his hands and arms to protect his head and face during the attack.

I
f Stefan had been in the room watching, the scientist in him might have been fascinated by what Ross did next, as she sectioned his body, carefully peeling back layers of flesh.

On the skull, she'd documented contusions and tissue damage, but once she reached the bone, it appeared surprisingly unharmed. Perhaps she assumed she would find cracks after such a brutal attack. The injuries were horrific to look at, leaving large indentations and gashes in the tissue, and they'd resulted in prolific bleeding, but the beating hadn't fractured Stefan's skull.

Once inside his chest, she studied his heart, noting signs of chronic high blood pressure. Yet the heart appeared relatively healthy. Inspecting the circulatory system that fed it, she found mild atherosclerosis, hardening of the aorta and major arteries, but judged it as insignificant when considering cause of death. The digestive system including the esophagus appeared normal.

Like the skull, no other bones showed any evidence of fracture.

There were indicators of fat in Stefan's liver, most likely a result of his years of overindulging in alcohol. But for the most part, Stefan Andersson's body appeared in tune with his age, typical of a man nearing the end of his sixth decade.

A
fter the in-depth description of each region of the body, Ross broke down the injuries into categories for her report. There would be two important areas. The first were the abrasions, contusions, and lacerations to the head and neck. As she'd struggled to count, she'd stopped at twenty-five. Yet that was merely an estimate of the number of blows Stefan suffered, one Ross considered low. Many of the strikes appeared layered, suggesting one blow landed on top of another, making it difficult to know exactly how many times the dead scientist had been hit.

While noting the abrasions to the neck and extremities, especially the arms and hands, it was the torso that Ross found more important, where she'd documented intramuscular hemorrhages. The physician suspected pressure had been applied to his chest, perhaps enough to impede breathing.

Using black-and-white line drawings of a full male body, she drew the injuries, including those on the chest and abrasions found on the back. On similar drawings of the head, she marked wound after wound, sometimes writing “cluster” next to groupings. The black-ink depictions of Stefan's wounds covered the paper. She did the same with the arms, showing that both were covered with injuries.

The exam ended, but Ross wasn't ready to rule on cause of death. She had more questions. Toxicology wouldn't be completed for weeks, and she wondered if Stefan could have been drugged. She'd found no offensive wounds on his body, only defensive ones, leading her to believe that he hadn't fought back. Could Stefan have been incapable of fighting Ana off because he was somehow incapacitated?

Another question in Ross's mind was whether or not the dead scientist had been strangled. With so many injuries to the neck area, Ross wasn't sure. To find out, the physician filled out a form requesting a trauma analysis of the bones of the throat, especially the hyoid bone, a U-shaped structure at the base of the jaw that sometimes breaks during strangulation.

The autopsy diagram

That day, once Ross finished, Stefan's body was transferred to the facility's anthropology lab, in hopes that the staff there would be able to answer Ross's question. After its arrival, technicians stripped the remaining tissue from the hyoid bone. Cleaned, the bone was examined by a bone doctor, first by sight, then with a stereomicroscope. “The specimen was unremarkable for trauma,” Ross
wrote. The bone and the neighboring structures were “as expected.”

Nevertheless, the intact hyoid didn't rule out strangulation. Many times, even in known cases of strangulation, the bone remained unbroken. There were physical indicators that convinced Ross that strangulation was still a possibility, including scattered petechiae in Stefan's left eye, delicate blood vessels which tend to burst during asphyxiation.

Finally, Ross had asked to see the shoe, and Miller retrieved it and brought it to her.

The pathologist had X-rays made, revealing a steel rod inside the five-and-a-half-inch heel. Black and white, the ghostly images explained why the shoe was so deadly. Comparing the heel to the wounds on Stefan's face and his shaved scalp, Ross confirmed a match, demonstrating that the shoe's heel lined up precisely with the pattern of the indentations and gashes on Stefan's head, face, and body.

Weeks later, the lab report came in. When Stefan's blood was tested, his alcohol rate was noted as .13, high enough that it would have been illegal for him to drive but in someone who drank nightly, as he did, not enough to make him appear intoxicated.

An X-ray of Ana Trujillo's shoe

No pot or illegal drugs were found in his system, but there was a small amount of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, also called GHB. While widely known as a date-rape drug used to render a victim helpless, it was also a by-product of other drugs, including an herbal sleep aid found in Stefan's kitchen cabinet. Ross noted GHB's presence, but because it was a minute level, she discounted it as a factor in
his death. In addition, the lab work documented traces of prescription drugs Stefan used, including an antidepressant.

The autopsy completed, Dr. Jennifer Ross signed the final report. Under cause of death she wrote: “Blunt force head and facial trauma.” Under manner of death, she concluded: “Homicide.”